First Step
by LilacFree
Summary: A look at Tegan Jovanka, on the occasion of her first encounter with the TARDIS.


"I mean, you lot, all you do is eat chips, go to bed, and watch telly! When all the time, underneath you, there's a war going on!" -- the Ninth Doctor, in 'Rose'

_As the news of the Kennedy assassination reached Australia, a little girl was displaying the first signs of an innately contentious personality. Her face almost as red as her brick-colored hair, she passionately refused to eat mushy peas. The Doctor, possibly the only being in the cosmos who might have persuaded young Tegan Jovanka to eat those peas, was too busy a) watching JFK be shot; b) destroying Skaro with the Hand of Omega; c) failing to respond to a letter complaining about the truancy of his grand-daughter, Susan; d) all of the above._

Tegan Jovanka crouched by the wheel of Auntie Vanessa's little red runabout. Her mood of 'can do anything' was starting to acquire a few punctures, and she feared it would soon be as flat as the tire. The roar of passing traffic was drowned out by the thunder of a big passenger jet overhead. Tegan looked up. That's what she should be doing, vaulting from one destination to another. "Now that's what I call travel."

"You and your airplanes," Aunt Vanessa shook her head, "I sometimes think you should have been born with wings."

_Tegan was five when her father let her sit with him in the pilot's seat and put her hands over his as he worked the controls of his prized Cessna. He asked her where she wanted to fly and she said, "There, Dad," pointing at the dark blue line where the atmosphere ended and space began. He explained to her as best he could that the plane was too little to fly so high, and so was she. She failed to point at any Dalek spacecraft, but it wasn't because there weren't plenty of them around that year._

The realization that she'd forgotten to jack up the car distracted her from yet another roaring sound. Tegan stuck at the task, convinced that nothing would get done if she gave up doing it. Her aunt was still hoping for a man to show up and help them.

"It's the 1980's, Aunt Vanessa. No knight errants." She tried not to be short with her auntie. Tegan had grown up with modern ideas of a woman's capability to manage her own life but her aunt was of a more dependent vintage.

The spare was flat, too. Tegan simply refused to be defeated. She would roll that spare tire to the nearest garage and if they tried to swindle her they would regret it.

_The year Earth was invaded five separate times without hardly causing a flutter in the news, Tegan stayed the whole summer at the home of her grandfather, the historian Andrew Verney. He lived in a village in the north of England called Little Hodcombe. She ran wild all over the place and wasn't there a week before she'd had three fights with the local children and made it up by showing them how to throw a boomerang—which she explained, was nothing like the real one she owned back in Australia, with which she personally had killed several people and a rabbit. Tegan's grandfather said he couldn't remember a hotter summer. It was cool inside the ruined church, but the children were forbidden to go in there on account of falling stones. Tegan, being Tegan, went there anyway, on a dare. There was a legend in Little Hodcombe that if one stared long enough the Devil's face could be seen in the cracks of one wall. Tegan hadn't been told this story, but she knew there was something she didn't like about the place._

_Down south, the Brigadier canceled all leaves for U.N.I.T. personnel and the Master's limo nearly hit Tegan's Aunt Vanessa as she was crossing a London street. He apologized (and later eliminated his driver)._

A tall blue box stood a dozen yards away down the roadside. Tegan glimpsed the word 'Police' and let the tire roll out from under her hands and into a ditch while she went up to read the legend on the door.

It had a phone. She could call a garage. Tegan reached for the handle of the telephone panel and at the touch of her hand, the whole door swung ajar. Her fingers tingled. She looked into the crack and it was like gazing down a tunnel with light at the far end. It opened wider; the brightness rushed towards her and shapes resolved before her staring eyes.

_By the time Tegan Jovanka was seventeen, her brick red hair had darkened to an auburn shade similar to burgundy wine. She saw 'Star Wars' and declared that Han Solo was definitely much sexier than that blond baby-faced drip Luke Skywalker. "Besides, he's got his own space ship. I always pay attention to what kind of transportation a man has. Look at the Millennium Falcon! She's built to handle trouble and she's big enough to live in. If she were my ship my feet would hardly ever touch the ground." Tegan would have been very surprised to know that on this day she was also at England's Brendon Public School asking Brigadier Alistair Lethbridge-Stewart for **a** doctor for **the** Doctor, her very own a) alien, b) guide, c) friend, d) fantasy, e) nemesis, or f) all of the above._

And now ('now' being the only time that one can point to), in 1981, she was gazing into what she shortly would discover to be the most fabulous transportation in the entire Universe.

"That's funny. Very peculiar indeed." The sound of her voice offended her ears: only nervous nellies talked out loud to themselves.

What was this, a magic police box that led to Narnia? A frisson of inextricably mingled wonder and fear ran up her spine. The solid mundanity of all England was at her back. Why should she be afraid? She took one step inside…

_Nothing was ever the same after that. Not the sky, not England, not her dreams, not her Aunt Vanessa, and certainly not Tegan Jovanka._

The Beginning


End file.
